Spy lamp broadcasts your conversations on Twitter

Brian House and Kyle McDonald’s creation, the Conversnitch, impersonates a lightbulb or lamp while eavesdropping on and livetweeting nearby conversations

Kyle McDonald

As former NSA director Michael Hayden learned on an Amtrak train last year, anyone with a smartphone
instantly can become a livetweeting snoop. Now a whole crowd of
amateur eavesdroppers could be as close as the nearest light
fixture.

Two artists have revealed Conversnitch, a device they built for
less than $100 (£60) that resembles a lightbulb or lamp and
surreptitiously listens in on nearby conversations and posts snippets of
transcribed audio to Twitter. Kyle McDonald and Brian House say
they hope to raise questions about the nature of public and private
spaces in an era when anything can be broadcast by ubiquitous,
Internet-connected listening devices.

"What does it mean to deploy one of these in a library, a public
square, someone's bedroom? What kind of power relationship does it
set up?" asks House, a 34-year-old adjunct professor at the Rhode
Island School of Design. "And what does this stream of tweets mean
if it's not set up by an artist but by the US government?"

The surveillance gadget they unveiled Wednesday is constructed
from little more than a Raspberry Pi miniature computer, a
microphone, an LED and a plastic flower pot. It screws into and
draws power from any standard bulb socket. Then it uploads captured
audio via the nearest open Wi-Fi network to Amazon's Mechanical
Turk crowdsourcing platform, which McDonald and House pay small
fees to transcribe the audio and post lines of conversation to Conversnitch's Twitter
account. "This is stuff you can buy and have running in a few
hours," says McDonald, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at the
Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the
Arts.

ConversnitchKyle McDonald

House and McDonald first tested Conversnitch at the "Prism Break
Up" Eyebeam art exhibition in Manhattan last October, but wouldn't
say where else they've planted it, citing legal issues. "We
recognise that this device can be used in an illegal way, and we
will not admit to using it in that way," McDonald says cagily. "It
has potentially been deployed in various places."

The two artists did caution Mechanical Turk workers to obscure
any names mentioned in eavesdropped conversations by reducing them
to a single initial. And they admit that the transcriptions they've
received are also less than 100 percent trustworthy; they've
deleted several tweets amid suspicions that turkers were
fabricating quotes.

Conversnitch being planted in a library. House and McDonald obscured the individual’s face to avoid legal issues

In fact, McDonald also participated briefly in an earlier
project similar to Conversnitch known as Chattrbot, which recorded
conversations in a room and posted bits to Twitter. But Chattrbot's
creators warned their subjects that they were being recorded and
had them agree to a data use policy. That
safeguard took all the impact out of the experiment, says McDonald.
"I think you have to make things provocative or even dangerous if
you want people to pay attention," he says.

He also argues that a tool like Conversnitch is just a taste of
the real privacy threats facing Americans in an age of the sweeping
NSA surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden; the NSA contractor's
bombshell leaks came to light around the same time McDonald and
House began working on their project.

"You can't make this stuff up anymore," says McDonald. "Here
were Brian and I trying to make something kind of scary, something
that makes you wonder if someone's watching you all the time. And
then Snowden says, 'They are.'"